


Now and Then

by town_without_heart



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (Minor) Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, BAMF Sam Winchester, Canon-Typical Violence, Everybody Dies, Gen, It's really awful how is that actually a tag?, POV Second Person, Sam's Terrible Life, Temporary Character Deaths, What if?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 01:46:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11174460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/town_without_heart/pseuds/town_without_heart
Summary: It happens right after you exorcise Meg. When Dean’s talking to Bobby, voice hushed in respect for the dead, asking about supplies and salt, it hits you. It drops you to your knees. It’s worse than any vision you’ve ever had – information and agony crammed into your brain  – all in the span of a breath. You inhale as one man, and when you exhale –





	Now and Then

**Author's Note:**

> I've only watched the first couple seasons of Supernatural, and it seems that things just go progressively more and more wrong? Anyway, I wanted to write a fix-it, but I never got around to that. Instead, I wrote this ficlet a while back as a sort of prelude to a fix-it for the end of Season 1, with some bleed over into the events of Season 2. Some of this happened, some of it didn't, but in the end I am protected by the blanket "AU" tag. No idea if I'll ever continue this into the actual fix-it part of the story, though.

***

It happens right after you exorcise Meg. Right after you speak the words that result in the removal of the demon and the death of the girl. When Dean’s talking to Bobby, voice hushed in respect for the dead, asking about supplies and salt, it hits you. It drops you to your knees.

It’s worse than any vision you’ve ever had – information and agony crammed into your brain – all in the span of a breath. You inhale as one man, and when you exhale – 

You see your father smiling, eyes gleaming gold as your big brother, proud, invincible – begs. Barely a whisper passing bloodstained lips – “Dad, please–”

You see yourself, snagging the colt from the table with hands that should be shaking – would be, had your father not trained it out of you before you knew your tenses – and that smile on his face, that damned, shit-eating grin – “Kill me and you kill daddy–”

“I know,” you say in a voice that doesn’t waver and you shoot him in the leg. The bullet stuns the demon, drops your father to the floor and the invisible hold on your brother falters. He slumps, bleeding, on the ground. 

God, so much blood, and you realize why – what will one day scar, marks clawed around a heart as if to remove it, poetry and irony aside, you can’t even imagine how that must feel.

But you can’t kill your father. Not even with the demon you hate so much inside him. It would kill Dean to lose the man who raised him. And you, no matter how ungrateful you may appear.

You see the demon make its escape, and then you make your own, only – you don’t see the eighteen-wheeler until it impacts the Impala. Eyes fluttering open, twisted metal screaming in your ears, you see the aftermath, demon at your door, and the very real threat in your voice it took to scare it off.

Dean, dying. In that hospital, sterile, unreal. Your father, and the deal you realize he must have made.

Dean, alive. Your father, dead. The colt, gone.

You’re not an idiot. Neither is Dean. Two and two equals demonic mojo and a hard on case of survivor’s guilt – the sad play of love and loyalty that weren’t enough, not really. He’s reckless in his grief, stakes high, but so are the risks. 

You see his fist as it comes at you, disbelief coloring your reflex and you don’t even try to dodge. Head snapping hard to the right, though you can’t recall what exactly you said to piss him off. It’s the first time Dean’s ever done that – hit you because he was angry, not a shapeshifter or accidental or even playful, but pissed at you, and wanting – in his eyes, you can see it – to shut you up. To take you down.

Because you’re not dad. You’re not the reason – the ache in his chest, jaw a steel trap of gritted bone, hands clenched white with rage and sorrow. You’re just the little brother who wasn’t there for four years, and every time Dean looks at you, you can see the resentment in his eyes. You can’t make this all better; you don’t even know where to start.

Dad might know, but dad’s dead, and you’re dealing with your own grief the only way you know how – too little, too late.

It happens on the one-year anniversary of your father’s death. You’ve been hunting since, knowingly seeking out the creatures that go bump in the night. You’ve pulled Dean’s ass out of more than one pinch, kept him alive though he seems hell bent on walking the same road your father did. 

With the devil, that is.

It’s a possession. A demon that feeds off anger and regret. A demon that you meet that night, as he slips into your brother’s skin like a suit. You can sense the change in him when he comes back from the bar he’d been casing, but the demon is quick. It has you pinned to the wall before you can go for your holy water, your salt, your rituals.

You see Dean’s hand around your throat, squeezing. Not enough to snap your neck, but enough to make you gasp. Black starts to tease the corners of your eyes, and all the while, it’s using Dean’s voice to hurt. “Not good enough, little brother,” it says, and you know it’s not just talking about the hand on your neck. Then you black out, and for a little while you don’t fear anything at all.

When you wake up, you see yourself tied to a chair. Dean’s smiling at you. You’ve always thought he had a nice smile; it reminds you a little of your mother, of growing up in a childhood filled with monsters that didn’t scare you because you had someone looking out for you. But this smile is a promise, of pain and unpleasant things to come; all you see are teeth.

The demon wearing Dean’s face tortures you. It hurts you in ways you didn’t know were possible, and it makes it last. It stretches minutes to hours to days, and all the while it whispers the accusations you’ve seen in Dean’s eyes for the last year. 

“Should have been you to die that night, Sammy. Dad and me, we were a team, and you – you were the one to leave us behind.” Then Dean laughs, a cruel sound, and scoffs, “How’d you think you were gonna save me, huh? You can’t even save yourself.”

You’re half-dead when it happens. All you know is one minute you’re praying for an end, angry and afraid, a litany // _make it stop, make it stop, make it stop_ // and the next, Dean collapses as the demon screams in agony. It rips out of him, tearing him apart from the inside to get away. It’s only later that you realize it was trying to get away from you.

Somehow the ropes holding you come undone. In the rational part of your mind, you realize it was you who undid them, manipulating the knots with your mind. Dean dies in your arms, a bubble of blood on his lips that sounds something like, “I’m sorry–”

Inside you, something snaps. 

You don’t know how long you sit there. Long enough that you can’t feel your own legs, and Dean’s body is cold and stiff in your arms. Long enough that the demon who has spent days torturing you finds a new meat suit, returning to finish what it started.

It’s a build to this point, because no matter what you did, no matter how you argued semantics, the demon is right. You can’t save your brother. And when that demon tries to kill you, to take you out while you’re distracted – well, you break.

You kill that sonofabitch with the untrained power of your mind alone.

Other demons feel it. Feel your mind ripping him apart because you want him to go, same as your brother went, bloody and a bare trickle to each minute but so deep it burns. You know they all feel it, because you want them to. And then it comes back to you, from every one of them – those creatures that walk, sheltered in the skin of man. They didn’t think you could do that. They didn’t think anyone had that kind of power over them, not in this mortal realm. And you feel it, slow realizations dawning to understanding and finally –

Fear.

They learn, in that split second, to fear you and the power you wield.

Cradling the body of your brother’s mutilated corpse in your arms, nose bleeding because you pushed, too far, too fast, you drink that feeling in and you smile. It’s only by chance that you look down and see that smile reflected in a congealed pool of your brother’s blood and you recognize it. Shit-eating grin, and goddamned if your eyes don’t seem to glow gold.

It’s just the light, you think.

Just the light, you repeat.

Just the light, and you try to believe it.

But it doesn’t stop you because you have a job to do. You cremate your brother, slip into his leather jacket and inhale his scent. Then you drive his Impala – because to you, it will always be Dean’s car – across the state borders and you start the hunt.

They fear you because you don’t need exorcisms to rip them raw and screaming from their meatsuits. Doesn’t mean you don’t employ them anyway, because sometimes the headaches and the nosebleeds and the feeling that what you do with your mind is killing your body just isn’t worth the waste on a small-fry demon who snivels at your feet and begs you to make it quick.

As you start to work your way up the food chain, your cellphone starts to ring. The first call comes from Missouri. In a voice that doesn’t waver, she tells you that she’s going to die. She tells you that the demon is standing not two feet from her and that it’s going to kill her. She tells you that unless you stop, more people you know will suffer the same fate.

She tells you to keep up the good work. Then she screams.

You floor the gas pedal, cellphone flush to your ear as you listen to her tortured breath, when she no longer has the strength to scream. You listen to the noises she makes, and you know you won’t get there in time to save her, but you don’t hang up the phone because she deserves to be heard. You don’t say a word and then you hear it – that deep, heavy sigh that shouldn’t be any different than the rest but somehow it is, you know it is, and then she doesn’t make another noise.

You speak into the receiver – “You sonofabitch. I will find you and I will tear you into tiny fucking _pieces_.” – and there’s a laugh, “Sammy-boy, you never learn, do you? Your dad says hi, by the way. He misses you or at least that’s what I think he was trying to say. Don’t speak so good, these days. Can’t find his tongue.”

The line goes dead and when you arrive at Missouri’s house, even knowing what you’re going to find, you still marvel because that’s a lot of blood. So much damned blood, and some from the ceiling drips onto your face, and it’s almost like crying.

You burn her, scatter the ashes, salt the ground. You kill every demon in the town. It takes two days without sleep.

And then, to make sure those fuckers get the point, you kill every demon in the _state_. It takes you six months to clean house, but they don’t just leave you to it. Every time your cellphone rings, you answer it and listen to someone else you know die.

Bobby goes the day after Missouri, because if Missouri is a favored aunt, then Bobby sure as shit makes it to beloved uncle. His last words, gasped on the phone, “Don’t do nothin’ stupid, y’damned idjit,” but it’s Bobby, and the words themselves are worthless because the way he says them is // _be careful, I love you, my stupid boy_ // and there’s nothing you can do but choke on the _no, please_ that gets caught in your throat.

Little Becky, her brother Zach. Gone. They died together, but she died first. Listening to Zach’s uncontrollable sobs, pleas for his sister that fall on deaf ears, you envy him a little. He saw her die, but as his sobs turn to screams, you know he won’t have to live with that pain.

Lori. The pretty reverend’s daughter. You only kissed her once, but as she begs you to save her, to make it stop, you wish you hadn’t. Hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t saved her from the Hookman. Compared to this, he would have given her a clean death.

When Sarah’s call comes, you find yourself frozen. Of all the people they could take from you, she’s the only one left who really means something. You think to yourself that one day, if you survived this mission, you might have been able to love her. That she might have been able to save you from the monster you see growing inside yourself.

She talks to you, through the screams and the pain. She tells you that she’s glad you’re with her, in voice and in spirit. She tells you that you have to keep going, because otherwise everything she feels right then will have been a sacrifice made in vain. She tells you that she understands, and that she forgives you.

When she dies, you touch your face. Your fingers come away dry.

They’ve taken everything from you. Your mother and Jess. Your father and Dean. Bobby. The people you’ve gone to for help, and the one’s you’ve called friends. There’s nothing left for you now. Nothing left to do but destroy them all. Nothing holding you back now, because no matter who else they kill... they’ve already taken the one’s who matter.

When you stop by Ellen’s bar, she looks up from behind the counter and her eyes widen. You don’t know what she sees in your face, but she sets a bottle of whisky and a shot glass down next to you and leaves you to drink it in peace.

In passing, you tell her to keep Jo safe, because everyone who has ever met you is going to die. Then you laugh because it’s not funny, but it’s true.

When she asks you why, you smile, wide shit-eating grin, and you tell her the truth. You tell her you’re killing demons by the hoard, and that you won’t stop until they’re all gone. “Killing them,” you say. Not sending them back to hell to crawl back into some comfy human skin when it’s all said and done. Killing them so they don’t come back because they’re gone – not a memory or a ghost – just gone.

Another hunter sidles up to you with a snort and says, “Son, you don’t kill demons, not like that. You can send ‘em back to hell, but they always find a way–”

And then he looks beyond your grin and into your eyes, and he takes a step back with a “‘Scuse me, didn’t mean no disrespect,” and fades into background just long enough to disappear out a door.

You don’t need dad’s book anymore, or any book, really. You can recite the exorcisms from memory, flawless and complete. You can sketch a Devil’s Trap with your eyes closed. You can find a possession just by scanning the crowds with your eyes, alone and unaided.

So, you kill demons. You kill them, more and more, until you don’t know how many have died by your hands. You don’t even know how many years it’s been since Dean died and left you with nothing but a car and the memory of what a smile should be.

The calls come at less frequent intervals. A woman you saved in Kansas, a pair of young brothers who cry as only children are able, a man who once called you for help on a case with evil spirits and planes. They die because they met you, just once.

The demons are getting desperate.

When the call comes from Ash, you pause. In a voice that sounds like death, he tells you that Jo and Ellen are gone. He says, unconcerned, that the demon is standing two feet from him, waiting to kill him where you can hear it. There’s nothing else to do but listen to him suffer, and you tell him, softly, that you’re sorry. You’re sorry you can’t save him. You’re sorry all you know how to do anymore is kill.

“Good,” he says, gasping unevenly. “You kill – ah – you kill all of ‘em. Then maybe – ah – maybe I’ll forgive you – for what they did to Jo.”

“I’ll kill all of ‘em,” you reply. “But don’t forgive me. Don’t you dare.”

“Gotcha,” he says. Then he laughs, a sick sound, and asks, “Hey. You know what – ah – what I can do – with twenty pounds of – ah – sawdust, fifty-six pounds of sodium – ah – nitrate, fifty-eight pounds of ammonium oxalate, two pounds – of gun cotton, and sixty-four pounds – ah – of nitroglycerin?”

There’s a pause, and then you hear the demon say faintly, “Oh, shi–”only to be abruptly silenced by the sound of two-hundred pounds of dynamite exploding in a chain reaction that wipes out half of the countryside.

You see yourself in the mirror, then. At the wrinkles creasing the corners of your eyes and the streak of white that peppers your hair. You see your father.

Your phone doesn’t ring anymore –

Your life, all of it, start to unending finish. Fire and salt, ashes and bone, silver and steel. Black eyes and cruel smiles, and so much fucking fear. You kill and you kill, a machine or a monster. They call you Winchester, the Boogeyman, and not one of them knows your first name. It doesn’t matter. _Nothing_ matters.

– because there’s no one left to call.

You come back to yourself, choking, gasping.

You see, it happens right after you exorcise Meg. Right after you speak the words that result in the removal of the demon and the death of the girl. When Dean’s talking to Bobby, voice hushed in respect for the dead, asking about supplies and salt, it hit you. It dropped you to your knees.

Worse than any vision you’ve ever had – information and agony crammed into your brain – all in the span of a breath. You inhale as one man, and when you exhale –

Well. 

When you exhale, you find yourself as someone else completely.

***

__

_fin?_


End file.
